History and Career in a Bureaucratic Labor Market

This paper present a synthesis of theoretical statements on the determinants of socioeconimic achievement with bureaucratic (internal) labor markets and an empirical examination of the reultant predictions. The study focuses on careers in the U.S. civil service from 1963 to 1977, using official personnel records on a 1% sample of whitecollar federal employees, along with secondary survey data. The career is viewed as an outcome not only of individual attributes but also of both organizational and historical contexts. The empirical strategy used to disentangle the individual, organizational, and historical effects is cohort analysis. Five successive entering cohorts are differentiated, and for each a model of socioeconomic achievement is estimated which corporates key characteristics of bureaucratic labor markets not heretofore considered in such models. The considerable power of the model to account for variations in occupational prestige and salary supports a Weberian view of bureaucratic labor markets a highly rationalized personnel systems, although ascriptive characteristics also affect career success in the federal service. The cohort analysis reveals important organizational and historical effects which are interpreted as demonstrating the influence of variations in opportunity structure on socioeconomic achievement. The paper concludes with a call for greater sociological attention to the interrelationship of individual biography and societal history.